Web-based and other search services today offer users powerful information capabilities. The user interface for search experience has grown in sophistication, including to parse a user's inputted search terms or search results themselves to detect potential misspellings or other input errors. In general many of these search assistance tools are initiated only after discrete events in the search workflow, such as after the user has hit “enter” or otherwise transmitted their search input to a remote server or other location.
However, users performing search activity may encounter difficulties in their search and navigation efforts at any time in their search experience. Sometimes that difficulty may arise at the beginning of a search session, or it may develop after the user has progressed through several layers of search refinement, only to have further progress stymied or interrupted.
The need for query help is moreover often not or not only predicated on correcting typographical errors, but on other higher-level indicators that the user has gotten “off-track” or otherwise reached an impasse, dead end or other unproductive phase in their search activity. Those indicators of an unproductive phase may include search page dwell time, or other time-based or other parameters characterizing the user's search activity. Other problems in search assistance and navigation technology exist.